Lucia Love and Zoe Avery Nelson each have a conceptually layered painting practice that is informed by their sociopolitical identities and values.

We bring the work of these two New York-based painters together for Future Fair Online, on view from May 6 - June 6, 2020.

Lucia Love's surreal paintings are packed with symbolism referencing politics, gender, history & the dynamics of power.

Love focuses on a cast of characters she refers to as Doomerangs who are placed within situations that call to mind the comedic absurdity of present reality.

Two Aphrodites depicts the goddess as mythological animals: a carnal she-goat and a languid swan. In her dual forms, the goddess is trapped inside a milk crate, her love and beauty unappreciated in this subterranean space.

Like a work of speculative fiction, Love pushes actual events to their most absurd extremes to create her imagined worlds.

Love's recent paintings use the elements—in particular, fire and water—for their symbolic readings as well as for their relationship to ecological and manmade disasters.

A figure Love refers to as the Water Carrier recurs in many of her paintings. The Water Carrier acts as an avatar for Love's interest in feminism and its many forms and becomes a narrative link between the paintings.

Her watery burden is a nod to traditional head-carrying practices as well as the posture-training method at Victorian finishing schools.

Lucia Love (b. 1988, New York, NY) attended the School of Visual Arts on a grant from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, where she studied painting and animation.

She is co-host of the podcast Art and Labor which chronicles the stories of social justice organizing within the art world and advocates for fair labor practices for artists, museum workers, art handlers, interns, and anyone traditionally overworked and underpaid in the field.

Her debut solo exhibition at JDJ, Fire Water, will open later this year.

Zoe Avery Nelson's paintings capture a sense of movement and fluidity.

Colors slide from one hue to another, and shapes shift from abstraction toward a sense of swirling figuration.

Much like their paintings, Nelson embodies a sense of fluidity, as their relationship to gender exists outside the normative binary.

The formal language embedded in their paintings visually traverses through their experience of embodiment.

Zoe Avery Nelson (b. 1983 Rhinebeck, NY) and received an MFA from Columbia University in 2009. They are a recipient of the prestigious Sharpe-Walentas Residency for 2019-2020. Recent solo exhibitions include Rubber Factory (2019), JDJ | The Ice House, Garrison, NY (2018), and The Lighthouse Works Gallery, Fishers Island, NY (2017).